Understanding long-term trends in highly migratory pelagic stocks in the Pacific Ocean is extremely important as fishing in the Western and Central Pacific is vital to both local economies and the global food supply, accounting for 14% of global seafood. The Pacific is considered “data poor” due to a lack of substantive data, poor quality data, and little fishery-independent assessment. Fishing vessels are nearly exclusively foreign-flagged with virtually all landings exported to Asia and Europe, whereas the GDPs of these island nations are wholly supported by sale of licensures to these fleets.
The first chapter examines the validity of using best-available data for ecologically important reconstruction, as well as an overview of approaches used to overcome the encumbrances of such data: self-reporting and profit-maximization. We also examine current methods for handling data-poor situations in marine environments, which provide unique challenges to surveying, patrolling, and enforcement.
We applied two modeling approaches to investigate the population dynamics and sustainability of seven species of large predators in the families Xiphiidae, Istiophoridae, and Scombridae comprising the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission Aggregated Catch/Effort database from 1950-present. The entire management region was examined, with the Exclusive Economic Zone of Kiribati explored in detail. This collection of islands and seamounts covers 3.5 million square kilometers including several areas of conservation interest and variable bathymetry.
The first, a “traditional” autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model, revealed shifts in effort, Catch Per Unit Effort (CPUE), catch, abundance, and morphology in all populations, regions, and management area. Second, Catch-MSY identified the Maximum Sustainable Yield (a common metric for fisheries management) for each species by region and the basin. This approach is unique, depending completely on non-reliable self-reported landings data to construct population models useful for management in the absence of costly surveys; often the best available data outside of North America and the EU.
This body of work provides the foundation for cost-effective sustainable management of key high-profit open-ocean market species. It identified greatly reduced CPUE of targeted species, increasing CPUE of likely bycatch. Finally, we established catch limits for every reported species in the basin and subregion.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/49063 |
| Date | 01 July 2024 |
| Creators | Carr, Benjamin Hamilton Collier |
| Contributors | Kaufman, Leslie S., Crawford, John D. |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
Page generated in 0.0022 seconds